Basic RGB

In recent years, coding—the wizarding of 0s and 1s into digital reality—has received a bit of a public relations makeover. Cable television series like Halt and Catch Fire aimed to do for Reagan-era computing what Mad Men did for mid-20th century advertising. Hundreds of websites now promise even the most technologically compromised individuals the possibility of becoming armchair coders. Once the province of MIT classrooms and Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room, coding has simultaneously become more popular and more democratic. Its image has morphed from male-dominated nerd labor to extracurricular activity of supermodels like St. Louis-native Karlie Kloss, who launched Kode with Klossy in 2015 to cultivate a new generation of female computer programmers.

But for all of this newfound interest in learning the ins and outs of computation, it can be easy to forget that each of us already occupies a dual role as coded and coder. Genetically encoded from birth, we grow to learn and decipher a variety of other human-made codes—social codes, honor codes, language itself. The pulse of yellow light beaming down at us from a stoplight is more than arbitrary color. It has acquired specific signification over time. Yield, it commands us. From Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown to Sandra Bland, the unnecessary deaths of young black men and women have shown that blackness and black bodies, too, continue to be encrypted with meanings, some negatively-charged. Blackness as other, as danger, as threat.

Opening this week at St. Louis Community College at Forest Park's Gallery of Contemporary Art, the exhibition Encoded uses the concept of the code to mine the complexities and rich multiplicities of being black in America. Multidisciplinary in scope, this group show features the work of artists Lyndon Barrois Jr., Addoley Dzegede, Jen Everett, Kahlil Irving, Danielle and Kevin McCoy (collaborating as WORK/PLAY), and Kat Reynolds. For Irving, who also serves as the show's curator, Encoded looks at “signs, symbols, and symbologies that highlight experience[s] of living in the United States as a black person.” The show’s integers are not binary numbers, but rather ideas and materials. Irving underscores that “material has meaning.”

“Material meaning is integral to the construction, the conceptual and existential existence of the work, the layers of it,” he reflects.

With a background in graphic design, Kevin McCoy is keenly aware of the subliminal messages we internalize through culture. Together, McCoy and his wife Danielle work collaboratively as WORK/PLAY. For the show, the duo decided to riff on a claim they frequently heard white people make: "I don't see color." The elephant in the room features three rectangles of faux black velvet hung across the gallery's wall. Silkscreened onto each banner is the phrase "You See Color." Visibly bold at left, the word "color" undergoes a metamorphosis, disappearing into near shadow as the viewer's gaze reaches the third and final bolt of fabric. The effect is a challenge, both to the very (im)possibility of colorblindness and to the viewer's own capacity to see. The piece serves a witty and thoughtful riposte to claims for a post-racial society.

Repetition is central to the barbed visual humor of The elephant in the room, but it also figures into the photo-based work of Jen Everett. Though her background is in architecture, Everett has most recently looked to photography as a means of exploring the black archive, specifically her own family archive. In the series Something We Carry, Everett nimbly arranges, re-arranges, and duplicates images captured by her maternal grandparents while living in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. Though these are family photographs, much of the context surrounding each image is lost, even to Everett. In this loss, however, Everett finds potential. She surmises that her grandparents so thoroughly documented their lives in order to provide a positive visual counter-narrative to black stereotypes circulating in the press. The very existence of these photographs, and Everett's reconfigurations of them, is thus an affirmation, a testament not to loss, but to the vitality of black life. Reinvention, storytelling, and myth-making all become possible in the gap between what is known and unknown in each image. If the archive is a code, then Everett's work treats indecipherability as an invitation.

Kahlil Irving's piece Cortège (Malcolm, Martin) also contends with history and memory, albeit on a more collective scale. Two large, black-and-white American flags unfurl from the ceiling of the gallery and curl gently onto the ground. Both fashioned from copy paper, the flag on the right is hung upside down, its stars touching the floor. Two flags, two contrasting models of black radicalism, two deaths by assassination: Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. In choosing to use an inexpensive, superfluous material like copy paper, Irving calls attention to the seeming disposability of black lives. As Irving stages a funeral procession, the cortège of the title, for these two historical figures, he also initiates a conversation about current models for black activism and the value of black lives in contemporary society.

Walking through Encoded, there is a palpable sense that these works and the conversations that they engender exceed the modest exhibition space. One could easily envision a version of Irving’s Cortège (Malcolm, Martin) spreading across a building or a field, unbound from the white cube of the gallery. Indeed, both Everett and McCoy spoke of wanting to magnify and enlarge their respective projects. Imagine The elephant in the room unleashed from its chambers, confronting viewers en plein air like Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates? Until then, Encoded is an impressive reminder of the serious and critically engaged work being undertaken by black artists living in St. Louis.

Encodedopens Thursday, January 19, with an opening reception on Friday, January 20 from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibit runs through February 23. The Gallery of Contemporary Art is located at St. Louis Community College at Forest Park; see slide above for more information on parking and gallery location.

Emma Dent is an art historian and writer interested in American visual culture, especially advertising, design, and commercial print. A native St. Louisan, she relishes speaking with the artists and curators whose work enriches the city's arts scene.